My entries are super boring in Aprils past, and most of them are on the unhappy side.

4.19.08I dreamt last night that something horrible happened and all of my front teeth—the canines and all the ones in-between—fell out and that my dad was supposed to drive me someplace to get them put back in, and he didn’t want to go so we went to the hardware store instead. It was horrible…

Then, somehow in my dream, I ended up in this sort of dead-looking, yellowish, autumn-time field with my little brother and the older of my younger sisters… and we walked to these woods that were on the far side of the field, and when we got into the woods, my sister went ahead of my brother and I.

She came to this sort of little clearing dealy that was all sunken into the ground… and there was this pretty creature-y thing, surrounded by roses… and it asked my sister if she wanted one, and she said she did and walked into the clearing to go get it, but once she stepped into the sunken, dead-leafy part, the creature turned into this nasty ghoulie thing and you could see that all the roses were dead and wilted… and as soon as my sister took the rose, she turned into a rotting ghoulie thing and started chasing my brother and I…

I don’t really know what came of my brother in my dream, but I ran to this other part of the woods and came to another clearing where there was this huge pumpkin in a tree… only when I got closer, the pumpkin opened its eyes and had this creepy, attempting-to-be-endearing pumpkin grin, and it jumped down from the tree and it had a body that was all made of tree-limbs and branches…

So my dream ended with me being stuck between that and my zombified sister with her face all rotted off…

4.19.09One of the profs wrote on my evaluation paper “hair covers left eye.”

4.1.10

Lemony, if you didn’t know, is one of our beagle puppies. This is what she looks like.

And yes, she is named after a children’s author. Katelyn wanted to call her “Leprosy,” but we were forbidden from naming any pets after diseases…

4.5.10I do tend towards defeatist. I don’t like to be happy. I don’t expect to be happy. Do you know why that is? No?

It’s because I hate to hope for things and to get excited about things and to want to experience that happiness in full, only for it to be dashed away right before I could lay hands on it. I hate that. I hate to feel like I could be happy and be left with the buildup and then nothing. I’m sure you know what this is like.

So that’s why I will probably almost never seem genuinely happy. I’m not. Any time I am, I’m always secretly worried that something will come along and wretch that happiness away from me. So I try not to be too happy. I try not to get excited about things that I can never be sure about. If I try to want things and look forward to things, then maybe the disappointment will be a little less when they don’t pan out.

4.18.10Today has been a testament to the fact that everything good that ever happens to me gets ruined. More often than not, by my own hand as I resort to progressively more desperate and cruel ways of coping…

Will I tell you more than that? No. Although the ladies of Xanga have been very good to me and offered their sympathies and their ears, I am painfully aware that almost none of them would take my side.That doesn’t stop me being appreciative though.

I can tell you this though: I’m a horrible person. If you ever pit yourself against me—unwittingly or on purpose—and I perceive you as being unfair to the point where you could and would hurt my psyche, I swear I will fight back until I hurt you and in so doing, damage our relationship.I wish I didn’t do this, but I don’t want to be weak and I won’t want to be walked on and I don’t want to let you damage me if I can help it…

I never claimed that I was unselfish. Quite the opposite. More and more, in fact, I find myself warning people of this before they ever even have a chance to develop any closeness with me. I want them to be warned. I want them to have the chance to walk away.

Of course they don’t. They don’t take me seriously enough. Probably they think I’m being self-depreciating to garner their pity or to make myself artificially humble, but it’s not true. I say cruel things when people push me too far. I mean a lot of them, but not all of them. For instance, I don’t hate anyone. I just hate what they do to me.

4.20.10I’m concerned about my lack of interest in my usual persuits…sure…reading…whatever… keep losing my place or skimming and having to re-read pages because I wasn’t paying attention. I try to listen to some music, but then I turn it off after a few minutes because I don’t care about it. Even songs I’ve always especially liked.

I don’t really feel that interested in doing this anymore either, because really…what’s the point? It doesn’t make me happy. Nothing makes me happy. Sure I’ll go ahead and do it for the sake of something to do…but if things turn out badly, then I can’t see myself being motivated to do thing much at all anymore. What would be the point.

That would be nice…you know…telling me to “be happy” when I feel worse than I have in a very, very long time. Ha ha. Funny.

I have nothing good to say, and nobody to say it candidly to.

4.25.10When I was maybe six or seven, I caught a robin that was bathing in an upturned trashcan lid. It didn’t try to get away, so I held it for my sister to pat it before I set it on our chain-link fence and let it go. I forget about this incident for long stretches of time, but whenever I remember it, I feel like it’s one of my more unique accomplishments. How many people have actually caught (come on…you all know you’ve tried) a wild bird with their bare hands?

4.7.11It’s this pool of water, you see. It’s blue and bowl-shaped, and there is something in the middle of the bottom of the pool that he wants.black glossy glassy circular

He keeps circling around the edges of the pool, or crouching with his nose just above the water, and I can almost see the cartoon bubble with his thoughts—“how can I get it out without touching the water?” Like a cat with a fish. Or…after a fish.

I think he left it briefly twice today because there is a vague idea regarding possession that’s trying to come together and crystallize in our brain. It’s about something I wrote, and kind of about something dead that waits dreaming. Possibly about the thing in the pool and with April (which he has been after all this time anyway) and psychic disturbances……………I don’t know if I believe what I wrote anymore. Except of monsters. Bigger monsters than I am. It still applies to them. But we’re a small monster, so what shall we do?

He’s annoying me, both with this possession idea, and with his going around and around that pool like he is [possessed], and I told him there was no way to get it out without touching the water…and without a word or a flash of yellow iris, he tells me to shut up because I’m only talking to hear my own voice.And

has a thought. He looks coolly up at me and says without words that he knows he can’t get it, as he has no hands to hold a stick or a net and fish it out.

But I could do it.

4.8.11Today I’ve been arguing with myself in the back of my mind…on one hand, the brusque, cutting voice of my Wolf, and on the other hand…this cold, velvety voice that I can only assume is the remnants of my Dog.

I haven’t heard him speak in almost two years, and now it just wants to ask me a question. Just one, and I don’t have an answer for it. It’s scary…which is…also…scary. It creeps me out that I can creep myself out like this, but this voice that asks me this question…I can hear it in my ear. I can hear it and it sounds dead…but not detached and not angry. It sounds…I can’t even think of the word to describe it.

But I don’t know what to answer it.And then Wolf, when he’s not unloading expletives at this part of myself that I don’t know how to appease…Wolf gets overcome with shivers and starts cowering…

4.20.10I cannot live (I can not die)I will not fall (I’ll carry on until the end)Though years may pass (with some regrets)I cannot live (I will not die)

There were the words that could have been spoken by the voices that are simultaneously me. A me then and a me now, the me now that refused to give over. The me that, for all the ways that ithe I fall short, is am the only one that has ever grasped the notion that we will never die. And the sound gets into our blood, and I wonder when the sounds do this, just what is happening. What am I really taking?

4.21.10I did feel creepy about being on campus though…I feel like all the time I spent there wasn’t mine at all, but that all the things I did were done by someone else. Someone who has died. I was never there, except when I was walking to the beat of my doom tracks, and all my warmth was compressed into a molten ball in my chest, so the snow that deigned to fall on my skin did not melt because I was so cold and did not care…and then yesterday, in my wolf hood and with the half-dead red tulip that I took from the statue of whichever saint that was in front of the greenhouse, and vaguely wondered what student had put the flower in his hand and why.

But I walked through all the old buildings that I used to spend so much time in, and I saw no one I knew, and no one knew me. And I sat on a low wall above where more tulips in pinks and yellows and purples were planted, and remembered that when I was in high school, we were not allowed to use them as our class flower because, according to our teachers, tulips are funeral flowers. It’s not true, but the memory did increase my uneasy sense that I was visiting my own grave.

…and the memory of making myself late for class, because I was on the phone with her and standing outside the library, where the red tulips are always planted, and she was telling me I should get off and go to humanities so I could be a better human…

I don’t know if I became one. All I learnt from most of my classes was how to take symbols and abuse them until nobody can understand what I’m saying. It amuses me, and I think that since I’ve graduated, I’ve done increasing amounts of it…but to what end?

4.25.11And I felt that little flicker of rage again. It’s so small compared to what it was when I first heard what was being said to me, but it’s still there. I can feel it in my chest, flickering up and dying down again, but never quite going out…But I can ignore that feeling. Because I already know about them, I can go for stretches and pretend I don’t see the pretty, shattered pieces of creatures I know and have known…but I do. I still see them when I look, and it’s a sight that makes me angry like nothing else.

I thought about those stanzas I wrote, and especially about the last line, and I wondered who I am so angry with.It wouldn’t matter if I weren’t still angry, but I am. When I remember to look at the things that I will go mad if I don’t pretend not to see, then I remember how angry I still am.

I think that might be part of what my problem has been lately…that although I am letting it take a backseat to other things, I am still nearly sick with rage. But how do I confront myself over this? I mean, yeah, sure…I acknowledge in this post and others like it that I have this problem…but how do I stop myself from continuing? This is where I get stuck, because as much as I know that I can’t continue in this way, I feel an immense resistance in myself. I don’t want to let go of my feeling angry at these things. It would seem wrong to let it go. Like I was becoming cold like so many people are—like I was shrugging it all off because it’s not my problem and it is because I want it.

I think…and I admit that my grasp on what’s happening to me is tenuous and probably unreliable…but, I think that I’ve allowed myself to believe that if I properly apply my anger, I can turn situations to where I want them to go.

I know it’s wrong, and this knowledge is why I detest myself sometimes for getting angry so easily, but I do it anyway. And I feel like I’ve gotten angry with other people a lot less lately…but I think that’s because my angry feelings are primarily directed at some people that I absolutely have to conceal it from because they won’t understand why I’m angry, and an individual that absolutely doesn’t deserve my anger, if only because the things on whose behalf I am angry were, in a sense, given to me for the very reasons I’m getting angry. (Yeah. Figure that one out.) I’m not doing the right thing. And I know it.

4.25.12Outside of work, I saw a movie (Okay…so I guess I was still at work) and towards the end there is a scene where a unicorn gores someone to death. I laughed out loud. I never do that. It was a little bit awkward. I just…wasn’t expecting that, out of all the things that had already been crammed into the movie.I also saw a for real zombie in the parking lot at Jester’s apartment complex. This old lady was sort of standing where I needed to drive, and she didn’t move and just watched me try and maneuver my car around her…then I saw her watching me in my rear-view mirror, and when she finally started walking away, she was dragging one leg behind her. I am still sort of worried that I was either hallucinating or being overly imaginative…but I told Jesse anyway, just so he knows to look out for zombies when he’s out at night.

4.25.12Read a lot. Read a whole series of short books, and a guide book, and a book from a series that I am embarrassed to say I’ve enjoyed and am trying to not look forward to the movie adaptations…and am still secretly annoyed about because the only reason I started reading them in the first place was because my sisters told me I reminded them of a character that turned out to be the fabulously gay high warlock of Brooklyn… (yes, somewhere deep down, there is still a small flickering anger that lights up when these particular comparisons are made…..plus…..passive sentence structure! ahh! run away!!! fragments and lack of capitalization and such! multiple exclamation points and bad writing all around, just to detract from what I actually said!!! *panic and characters scattering in all directions* hdfshfggukyrgQHJVRTYQFRQJHV. *Caps lock makes a brief appearance.*)